


Revelation

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, Gen, in which siphoning is a tent show
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:48:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23339392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: Concerning the manifestation of the demon host, and the evils posed by the practices of occultism, as related by one Silas Octakiseron, in the year of Our Lord 1926, with the assistance of one Brother Colum Asht, his kin.Or:Siphoning, but it’s a tent show! We have fun here.
Relationships: Colum Asht & Silas Octakiseron
Comments: 1
Kudos: 20





	Revelation

The tent cloth is white, whiter’n christening cloth, and don’t everybody wonder loudly how they keep it that way, staked where it is in the river mud. 

The boy, somehow, is whiter.

Can’t be more’n eighteen, and skinny like something’s been burned outta him, and he’s white as Christmas, white as candlewax, with a fevery translucence around the eyes. He’s head to toe in seersucker and linen, flying around him like the wings of some enormous moth while he paces and rants. His voice swoops around like one, too:

“I have SEEN,” thunderously loud, with his bleached martyr’s eyes cast heavenwards, and then:

“I have seen,” in a whisper, and don’t everybody perceive, don’t they all apprehend, at once, that the boy is looking at them, only them, nobody else.

“My brothers and sisters, I have seen demons. I have summoned demons. I have walked among them. I have seen a girl not yet sixteen choking on her own life’s blood, I have seen men mad, I have seen men  _ dead _ , I have seen the soul RIPPED from it’s HOLY rest and at the last, my brothers, beset by the devils of my own pride, I saw the LORD, OUR GOD. I saw Him reach out to me, my sisters, as a mother would to her child.”

The jacket comes off.

The boy rolls his sleeves to the elbows, and he’s paler’n fish-belly, bluey veins on full display, and wrists shining with sweat.

“I was once among their number, my brothers and sisters, those callers of devils. But the LORD reached unto me, he pulled me from the miry clay, and though I may walk among them now, that evil cannot touch me,”

Now, the big man, the one who took the tickets, good coal-man stock, wiry-like, but big too, shoulders like the broad side of a shovel, he’s been gone this whole time, but has reemerged now, bearing a cotton-mouth as tall as his sainted kinsman up on the stage. He drapes it over the boy’s shoulders like an offering. 

Withdraws.

And  _ hallelujah,  _ ain’t that what all these good folks  _ came to see _ , big black end-of-days coils thrashing, white mouth opening horribly, straight at his throat and then—

Still. Curling around his arms like a kitten, sweet as you please.

“God has bid me go among you,” he says, cupping the scaly muzzle to his cheek, “He has bid me warn you of the grave, the mortal danger posed to your  _ very souls _ by the evils of this so-called ‘spiritualism’”

Flings his arms wide, now, and he puts on a good show, this kid, lets the snake go just to catch it again, and again, and again, wearin’ the damn thing like a feather boa now, crying:

“I know there are skeptics among you. I know that a cynical man, a worldly man, will say ‘Silas, my son, these are but parlor tricks. The greatest threat they pose is separating a simple man, a grieving man, from his money’.

And I say to that man, even so, is that not danger enough? Is that not wicked *enough*!? I say to that man, Brother, I pray you think more charitably of me,” and the crowd laughs, right on cue, “and I say to that man, that learned man, there are more things in Heaven and Earth. I say to him: I have seen DEMONS!”

“And I will show you. Brother Asht!”

Brother Asht mounts the planks, and he might be a coal-man, by the look of him, or a boxer, or just one of those poor bastards who never quite made it back from the War. He’s got the eyes, y’know?

Got hands like a sonuvabitch, too, thorny and hard, clasped in front of him, down by his hips. His knuckles are as white as Silas’s, but nothing else is; Brother Asht’s monkish crop of hair is a grizzled ashy blonde, compared to Silas’ cornsilk flop; his eyes are a dull tawny to Silas’s lambent blue. He is, head to toe, the colour of old bones.

Silas lays his hand on Brother Asht’s craggy shoulder. He has to strain to reach.

“Brother Colum Asht is my own kin,” he intones gravely, “A man I have known since my birth, a man gifted with an extraordinary... _ spiritual sensitivity.  _ It is through him that I may take up the arts that I have revoked,” he says, and his narrow chin jerks up, eyes flashing, he says, “Those arts which I REVILE, which the LORD  _ reviles _ , that I may show you, as God has bid me show you, what it is these occultists truly do.”

He raises Colum’s hands to his lips.

“Thank you, Brother,” he breathes, low over Colum’s knuckles “For your great service.”

Silas kneels.

Colum follows, hands still caged between Silas’s own, expression unreadable. Don’t have the look of a well man, Brother Asht, tell you what.

Silas lowers his head, and Colum lowers his head and they almost, but don’t quite meet in the middle, and Silas’s lips work silently, fervently, turning the bigger man’s hard-bitten palms to the heavens. A candle burns between them, thick as a man’s neck.

At the same time:

Silas’s eyes fly open, and Colum’s eyes squeeze shut, and he groans, a low, awful sound ripped from his throat as if by some unseen hook, a horrible redness among all that white.

His posture changes, growing rigid and strange, as though Brother Colum Asht no longer commands the lay of his own skin.

“Brother, can you hear me?” 

Lord, but the  _ noise _ that man makes, a choking rattle scraped from somewhere about 8 miles under his lungs. It ain’t words. Nothing on God’s green earth makes a noise like that. It is a high, delicate sound, like the shattering of glass. It is so low it shakes through the bones of the assembled, like to rattle a man’s teeth out of his skull. Like many voices. Like none. Jacob Petersen said later that it sounded animal, like a butchered hog, but the Petersen boys was always full of shit, truth be told. 

The noise says:

“We can.”

Silas raises his head, turning his stricken, radiant face to the crowd.

“Who is it that dwells in this man?”

Now, Noah Petersen said, after the fact, that the noise said “We are Legion,” like as to the demons cast forth by our Lord the Redeemer in the Book of the Prophet Mark, but them Petersen boys always was full of shit, and any number of others recollected perfectly that the name It spoke was the name of any number of demons who were bound by King Solomon of old, and others said they heard their own names, but everybody was of an agreement that it was  _ well _ worth the price of admission, tell you what.

Something about it, though. That noise.

That big man, mouth not making any kinda shape that’d match the words pulled out of him, swaying, very slightly, back and forth, face gone grey as a corpse.

And nobody, really, couldn’t recollect what happened for some time after that, but that when they’d collectively come ‘round it was to the boy, Silas’s moth-y whisper, so so soft, breathing:

“Do you see? My brothers and sisters, do you now see?”

He settles Colum’s hands in his lap, staring urgently into the Beyond.

“Brother, come back to us. Brother, Our Lord bids you return. Our God says ‘Come, and follow me’. Come back to us, Brother Asht.”

Brother Asht knuckles a thready ribbon of blood from his nose. He stands, and helps Silas to his feet.

Whole thing’ll only run you ten cents to see, can you believe?

Silas raises his white arms, beatific and glowing. Behind him, Brother Colum Asht is a dusty shadow, the solid edges of him smearing into the canvas of the tent.

“Go with God, my brothers and sisters. Tell the world what you’ve seen.”


End file.
